Starting a blog on our website, tirelessly working to add great content, is hard, right? OK, maybe you haven’t been working tirelessly, but you have been trying to post regularly, even though that doesn’t always work out. “Nobody reads my blog!” you’ll cry out to no one in particular. That’s OK, though, because Valorous Circle is giving you credit for trying! Blogging as a marketing and search engine optimization activity is an excellent thing to do. And yet, we often find that our content isn’t being read and wonder why.
Here are the Top 5 reasons that your blog posts are not getting read consistently.
1. You’re not writing about something people find helpful. There are already a million blog posts out there on “different things to do in xyz place.” By creating more “niche” content, you can provide some value. For example, “best places to find spicy food in Denver” is a much more specific post that carries value for the readers who put that inquiry into Google.
2. You’re not opening doors. A big part of funneling readers to your blog is about building a network of backlinks, which are hyperlinks to your site on other people’s blogs or websites. Use traditional networking to reach out to like-minded individuals or businesses and write guest posts for people on their blogs, with the stipulation that you can put some links to your site on there.
3. You’re not building relationships. You need to have a contact button or form on your website and harvest some emails. Alternatively, by blogging consistently and alerting social media connections of your new posts, you can draw some steady streams of traffic to your site. Recurring readers will increase your readership with their own eyes, and over time, share your content with others.
4. Your site doesn’t look good. If people hop on to your blog and find that it looks like the screen from Oregon Trail, they’ll probably bounce off the page faster than you can die of dysentery. Your website needs to look professional, and the architecture needs to be clean and well designed for all users, and in particular, those on the go.
5. You think you’re Shakespeare. Don’t get too literary with your posting, unless of course you’re catering to a high-brow audience. Use shorter sentences, small paragraphs, and plenty of imagery to punctuate those words. Don’t make your blog too exhausting to read. SEO experts like us still love long-form content (over 2,000 words), but you still have to balance that out with reader experience, most of which can’t tolerate more than half that word count, or about 3-5 thumb swipes.
If you take these lessons to heart and are still crying out “nobody reads my blog,” then it may be time to figure out other issues affecting the readership of your site. Not by your audience, but by search engines themselves. Blogging is a great way to create content, but is often not the most important way to capture Google’s indexing eye. This doesn’t mean you should stop blogging! Keep writing relevant content for your audience.
This Valorous Circle blog post on blogging and content marketing contains licensed content from a third-party source.
